Ricky Gervais, who hosted the Golden Globes last night, has been roundly attacked for being rude to practically everyone, including the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, whose event it was. Problem is: he was right, particularly about the HFPA. The Golden Globes are a joke (The Tourist nominated for best picture?) and the HFPA is an even worse joke. They consist of bunch of stringers for the Bucharest Bugle who work most of the year as waiters and waitresses. They’ll do anything to meet a movie star (hard as that is to believe). Hence The Tourist, Burlesque, etc. get nominated. I never watch, but did this time because I have to comment about the precedings today on the Laura Ingraham Show.

One special note for conservatives: dissing Hollywood is easy to do (I do it all the time), but the wise person tries to take it over. This is our culture, molding the minds of the future. Turn it over to the other side, if you wish, but do so at your peril.

So I can understand where you are coming from, youre asking all the Hollywood conservatives currently working in the Hollywood industry to come out of their closet, stop being so afraid, and have the courage to begin producing, writing and directing instead of begging for Tom Hanks and Ari Emmanuels approval?

Conservatives have the money and time, we are ergerly waitng to show up to your shows, so why cant you in Hollywood produce the product already!

Nolte was spot on… God bless Ricky Gervais… and you’re right too Roger. We the people shuffled off our governance to a class of nitwits and charlatans and look what we got. Ditto Hollywood… Tea Party movement comes to Tinseltown!

I support Declaration Entertainment, an effort by Bill Whittle and others to start making movies that reminds people of America’s traditions and uniqueness. I hope that helps a little to push back on the left’s slanderous treatment of America.

Hollywood is too entrenched to hope to take over, even at the margins. It better resembles a syndicate than a proper industry. Our best hope is to outflank it with new cultural beacons.

Our best bet is to attack areas where Hollywood has taken unjust advantage of their allegiances. First, as Glenn suggests, we should repeal laws like the DMCA, used these days mostly to stifle legitimate political speech and to put small content creators under legal siege.

Second, we should subject the major studios to FTC and SEC investigations. “Hollywood accounting” is a byword for graft, they’ve bought protection from lefty politicians for years, so why should artists and content creators continue to suffer? Why allow shady backroom distribution cartels to flaunt anti-trust laws and stifle small competitors? I’m not suggesting new regulations, just enforcing the old ones that they blew so much cash lobbying to create in the first place.

Third, cut off the National Endowment for the Arts. Our budget is completely busted. The cash has run out, completely. If individual states and localities can afford to continue state-run art, then great. Otherwise, let the people finance art directly, with donations and purchases.

Fourth, labor reform. Unions once played a valuable part in securing worker’s rights– but that time is long past. There’s all kinds of good reasons to have labor reform (ask a steelworker in Pennsylvania how the unions worked out for them, or a GM employee now). But not the least is the fact that cumbersome union rules create barriers to entry which hurt small studios.

I’d expect that, without the Feds defending their oligopoly for them, Hollywood will come crashing down. The elites would tsk-tsk and mourn the “death of culture” but the wave of entrepreneurial ventures that rushes in to replace it would kick off a renaissance.

I think we can do better than high-special effects, low-IQ movies; limp, predictable political thrillers; and an endless parade of derivative sequels and all-but-sequels. I think the market wants better, and can get it, given the chance.

If you’ve ever seen Ricky, you know that the only way to attack him is roundly. [rim shot]

“dissing Hollywood is easy to do… but the wise person tries to take it over. This is our culture, molding the minds of the future. Turn it over to the other side,… at your peril.”

I see a lot of pretty dumb, thoughtless commentary on PJ Media. But not from its owner, Roger Simon. He really has grown in wisdom during the time he’s owned the site. (Maybe before then, too, but I can only track him through what I see online.

I wish Mr. Simon were on ‘mainstream’ TV more often. I know why he’s not, of course – he doesn’t fit in with mainstream thinking. Which is precisely why the general public would benefit from more exposure to him.

One way to start to change Hollywood that appears to already be happening is the pocketbook. What was attendance on the last few examples of antiwar left of center authoritarian screed? (I reject using the term progressive for the new statist left) My recollection was that it wasn’t good.

Movies like Blind side are great stories that also appeal to a wide audience. I think this movies was appealing to moral conservatives as well as independents and centrists. We dont have as many examples as we’d like to see yet though. The huge untapped audience that is center/right is going to make someoen rich who learns how to appeal to this market, similar to the way the a non-captured news source, Fox, has demolished the ratings of MSNBC, CNN etc.

I agree. I refuse to contribute, financially, to people like Matt Damon or anyone else who publicly berates a Republican or the Republican Party. My husband and I tried to watch “Harry’s Law”, last night, but changed the channel just as soon as we heard Kathy Bates bash Rush Limbaugh and Republicans. We even wondered if that script was libelous or slanderous in any way….surely the writer could have written about a fictional person, instead. We also think that the Republican response to the label “Party of No”…should be, “We are the Party of No Nonsense”.

Subversion is what qualifies the left, uniquely. Conserving values are conservative. The left has dominance over the arts and here’s the reason why: art is the perennial generational struggle. Art history in all the arts is a story of individuation, consensus of individuals, meme dominance and renewed individuation of a revolutionary nature. It’s the kill-the-father Oedipal urge that moves us to distinguish ourselves from the context we were raised in, a modernizing impulse which compels us to reconcile the things we make with the lives we live. Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Ricky Gervais and on a lesser scale, even Captain Honors, the former XO who used transgressive humor to prop up morale on his USS Enterprise on long deployments. Don’t we all know that humor’s force derives from a tension and release from stress and fear, the dark side of human experience? And isn’t art history, like all history, a record of bad behavior?

Ironies abound. The left colonizes the arts to instrumentalize revolution for collectivist ends. The right defends the freedom which sanctions individual expression that inevitably threatens the status quo. One of these agents knows what they are doing and why, the other not so much. The major problem for the left is: they are the current status quo, and what they are trying to do is freeze frame their (60′s) revolution in order to build their civilizational dream come true. That this is suicidal, artistically, matters not a whit to them.

What the right should be doing not only for their sake but also for the sake of the left, is to not cede the ground of the arts, in the university, in pop culture. The right should get engaged, interact within the arts not only critically, intellectually in terms of an audience but more importantly with investment. Buy art! To do this, a person of the right should not see the other of the left as an alien but as a fellow citizen who is enjoying the fruits of freedom. Perhaps in this way, the echo chamber of the left will reverberate with a little less of the insane wish to create the impossible utopian dream, something those of us who are right wing enough to know that it always turns into a nightmare in the end.

Shoot-ups. Tourist was such a huge disappointment. Very interesting story line but all the gun play, chase scenes and the stupid, ridiculous end was so bad I felt ripped off. Watched The Town on DVD last night. A nugget of a good movie story there but the final shoot-up was just stupid. Bullets do not spark when they hit most things. Totally improbable ending (well pre-ending).

That said there are a few great movies lately. One staring Angelina of all people – the Changeling. I also loved the Pianist.

But why does Hollywood need to wreck a decent story with stupid absurd chase scenes and shoot-outs? Seriously why?

Some of it is simply the lack of artistry in films. “Black Swan” was to me, an average movie at best and stupid at worst, as in the end where Portman falls in slow motion onto a mattress for artistic reasons only known to people who are not me.

I like Portman as an actor but in this film she is given little to do but have the same expression on her face most of the film

The film itself requires everyone in it to be either mean spirited or simply stupid. If I lived in this world I’d be as crazy as Portman’s character and it can perhaps then be argued that she is the only sane person in the film.

“Black Swan” distinguishes itself on not one level; not cinematography, editing, screen play, casting, acting, etc. It will certainly be nominated for “Best Picture” Oscar.

The average Japanese SF anime film is more layered and nuanced and has a better understanding of its material than did “Black Swan”.

Thankfully the push for that horrible “SF non-SF film” “The Road” didn’t get the same traction last year. Magically transported out of its own genre of SF, it was hoped to have a patina of fine art. Within it’s own genre, it didn’t have the artistry of an average Science Fiction Channel made for TV movie about giant spiders in Antarctica.

This year the Academy should just pull “Best Picture” out of a hat or resort to an American Idol voting system; the likelihood of just desserts is about equal.